Election year choices are increasingly disconnected from most people's lives, controlled by the Democratic-Republican duopoly in thrall to corporate megabucks that buy off government, and covered by corporate media like a horse race.

House Republicans passed a bill taking permit authority over the Keystone Pipeline away from the President and giving it to Congress -- you can just imagine how President Bush would have reacted to a similar move by Congressional Democrats on his watch!

Obama's proposal sends an important message to youths and their families: "You are no longer invisible. We see you, we invest in you and we expect you to contribute in a positive way to yourself and to your future."

Right now, if you're a woman in the workforce, it can be surprisingly difficult to answer basic questions about equal pay: what's the typical salary for someone in your position? Should you be asking for more at the negotiating table? What are your fundamental legal rights?

What is possibly the most striking thing about Obama's message is that he's going to run as a strong foreign policy president -- something that I can't for the life of me remember happening in the past 30 or 40 years.

Millions of young people and their families are buoyed by President Obama's rhetoric, but a slightly reworded message year after year is beginning to ring hollow. Time for more action than words on immigration reform, Mr. President.

It might possibly cost the insurance industry $382 million to comply with the Affordable Care Act for the first two years. But the cost of allowing those companies to continue keeping consumers in the dark would be far, far higher, Mr. President.

Most of our national education efforts seek to teach low-income youth to become better workers. Why aren't we also teaching them how to own? If entrepreneurship is the engine of the American economy, why aren't we raising more creative entrepreneurs?